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A-List: RKCR/Y&R

Published on January 21, 2011.
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The year in creativity wouldn't have been quite as fun without the work of London agency RKCR/Y&R. The shop produced some of the year's best spots, including "Your Airlines Got It," a splashy Traktor-directed extravaganza for Virgin Atlantic; a playful claymation adventure for Land Rover, along with an equally fanciful making of film, produced out of Hornet; bold tales of pride for Warburtons and a quiet but disturbing effort for Home Office illustrating sexual abuse in teen relationships.

But the agency also demonstrated a propensity to leave the confines of advertising as we know it. For new client Bombay Sapphire, it launched an international campaign not with TV but with a series of artful buildling projections, and for LG it pulled out the skimpy swimwear and silicone for the much buzzed about "Young and Connected" mock soap opera, featuring a series of cheeky online shorts to help promote the brand's sponsorship of Channel 4.

On the digital side, the agency launched Recode Decode for the Victoria and Albert Museum, a campaign promoting the exhibit Decode: Digital Design Sensations. The agency commissioned digital artist Karsten Schmidt to create a new work for the exhibition website. The artwork's source code was made available online, and visitors were invited to recode the piece into their own creations, later showcased in a virtual gallery and used in digital outdoor billboards promoting the event.

The agency spawned a new venture as well, the record label Two Black Cats Records, to pair its clients with emerging artists. The "Lucky You" track from the label's first signing, L.A. band Le Rev, became the centerpiece of the shop's new campaign for GHD hair stylers, featuring a Cinderella-themed music video directed by Floria Sigismondi.